walking back to the big picture coming up in this half hour on wednesday the supreme court could deal with a major blow to the affirmative action programs that are helping african-americans gain a top notch education with unemployment levels far above the national average shouldn't we all be doing all week and the healthy african-american population succeed and bhutan is one of the least developed nations on the globe and yet it is light years ahead of america when it comes to happiness how is that possible i'll tell you in tonight's daily take.

in the best of the rest of the news job truth there's a side last week's job numbers showed significant gains in the african-american community well the numbers are still far too high the unemployment rate for african-americans dropped from fourteen point five in august down to thirteen point four in september which is the lowest level since two thousand and nine but there are still enormous challenges facing the african-american community consider these numbers revealed in a new book titled document desegregation since one thousand nine hundred eighty there has been no improvement whatsoever in terms of workplace desegregation for african-american men whereas white men have seen their access to managerial jobs increase since one thousand nine hundred sixty six among nearly all sectors the same holds true among african-american women as segregation of white and black females in the workplace is again on the rise clearly the election of barack obama

was not a cure all to america's race problems segregation is still with us it's not quite as late and yet on wednesday the supreme. it will hear arguments in the case of fisher v the university of texas which could strike a death blow to affirmative action when it comes to college admissions the question at hand is whether or not the university of texas can still use race as one of many factors in college admissions to promote greater diversity on campus the player in the case abigail fisher says such criteria kept her from attending the school because she was white those violating her rights and with five conservative justices on the high court fisher will probably find a sympathetic audience but can we as a nation really scrap affirmative action policies especially given the fact that there are such a significant socio economic differences between whites and blacks in america today joining me now to answer this question is in a my chair here director of the justice to program at the brennan center for

justice in my welcome. thanks for having me thanks for joining us what are the first of all what are the legal questions history here. so the legal questions here are whether the admissions policy of the university of texas violates the equal protection clause and is in line with past precedent that as long how that public universities that have a compelling state interest in creating a diverse student body and that they can implement inclusive admissions policies like the university of texas there was a. well first of all how do you expect that to be argued and how do you good to be what are the possible outcomes. well we would hope that the court would uphold its longstanding president in two thousand and three the case of the court decided a very similar case and so we're hoping that the court will stay in line with past precedent if it doesn't we would hope that it would find you know some particular

aspects of policy objectionable based on some sort of detail or logistics rather than just a blanket we're not for quotas or we're not for affirmative action. how do you how do you respond to the argument that affirmative action is quarters. right and so that's actually i think a big misconception around this case i think a lot of people hear affirmative action and they think that this is a quota system or that this is some sort of race based preference and in this particular case the university of texas is looking at a host of factors including extracurriculars athletic ability whether somebody holds a full time job during high school whether they're from a single family home what their religion is and also looks at race not to look just at race but how that has affected their personal experience and what they can bring to the intellectual vibrancy of

a university in the new york times today the. it was a fascinating article that i think really demonstrates the ongoing need for this they pointed out the children of professionals are on average exposed to approximately fifteen hundred more words. and children growing up in poverty the result is a gap of more than thirty two million words by the time the children reach the age of four and the variety of those words is dramatically diminished among children of poverty and so then those children go into school without the vocabulary necessary to be successful and without the mental exercise in the early years that comes along with a broad vocabulary and then they fail in school and they end up in poverty and they produce children themselves that have a limited vocabulary and in a single generation that can be broken i mean we saw this in the sixty's with the lyndon johnson's war in poverty he cut poverty in the united states almost in half over about a six year period isn't that

a compelling reason for affirmative action given that we still have this this huge separation in the united states. yeah no absolutely i agree with that and you know just a study came out from the pew research center this year saying that the median net worth of a white family is one hundred sixteen thousand dollars compared to five thousand dollars for a black family and so when when the wealth divide is so stark and you have students of color are growing up in inner cities where schools are underfunded textbooks are outdated and when their parents are working two jobs and don't don't necessarily have the money to pay for an essay t. class that they might not know the ins and outs of college admissions procedure as it leaves the students at a far you know disadvantage compared to others and there's i mean there's there's the obvious financial difference i think the average white family in america has

a net worth of around. eighty seven thousand dollars in the average african-american family has a net wealth of around five thousand dollars but there's also a cultural advantage i mean there's for five hundred years of slavery and legal apartheid and white privilege why is there no discussion in america of white privilege. and you know that's very interesting i think. what has happened is that we haven't really understood that a lot of our institutions and what we are considering to be for example. what is good in terms of academics is sort of built by around a certain group of people and then requiring other people to sort of meet that standard even though that might not necessarily be objective and that's where you sort of get into cultural differences and how you know you can even take for example actually in law school how. big is the crowd of math ed which has sort of

been proven for women and people from certain cultural backgrounds that style isn't it people aren't going to succeed with that style of questioning. it makes perfect sense in my thank you so much for being with us tonight yeah thank you. now on to economic news if you haven't heard of the chinese telecom giant why walk away yet then you probably will very soon as reported sunday night on sixty minutes the chinese multinational corporation wall way is the largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment the world and is making a bid to build the next generation of telecom infrastructure in the united states but a house intelligence committee report released today questions hallways motivations and ties to the chinese military report reads china has the means opportunity and motive to use telecommunications companies for malicious purposes the republican chairman of the house intelligence committee mike rogers told sixty minutes way if i were an american company today and you were looking at way i would find another

vendor. if you care about your intellectual property if you care about your consumers' privacy and you care about the national security the united states of america unfortunately this really has nothing to do with china it's about our insane policies because of years of so-called free trade policies there are no longer any american alternatives beyond cisco when it comes to building telecom telecom infrastructure in the united states that's insane this is a serious economic and national security concern whether it's a chinese company or canadian company the united states used to lead the world in telecom technology but in the last thirty years as reaganomics has forced our government to stop investing in critical infrastructure and open the door to monopolies foreign corporations have taken the lead on us welcome to third world america. is just.

it's the good the bad in a very very gallium threw up big glee. the good former congressman tom tancredo on a regular guest on my radio show while there were most likely be no mention of marijuana legalization in the next two presidential debates it's a hot issue around the country including in colorado where there is a ballot initiative to legalize the drug initiative has a great deal of support including from tancredo who is a former colorado congressman and a prominent republican marijuana legalization has also received support from another prominent republican washington state u.s. senate candidate michael baumgartner he recently endorsed the state of washington's marijuana legalization ballot initiative the fact that republicans are starting to come aboard the marijuana legalization platform is saying something and it's time for those in washington to listen the bad congressman scott tip to tip been a republican from colorado was asked by think progress reporters what he thought

about none. it is on a bus a group of nuns that is traveling the country campaigning against paul ryan's austerity budget tippins response i wrote the nuns off as a group of people that are trying divide america dept and also said that the nuns a lack be understanding of how to pay for federal programs comments are interesting especially considering that republicans in washington are doing all they can to help the wealthy elite prosper and leave the middle class in the dust now congressman tipped who is really trying to divide america and the very very ugly robert murray number one mitt romney talked about coal in the debate last week. and by the way i like coal i'm going to make sure we get to burn clean coal people in the coal industry feel like it's getting crushed by your policies. so why is romney look you know for the interests of big coal so much because he gets a lot of money from it and especially from robert murray's murray energy one of the

largest coal mining operators in america according to a piece in the new republic murray all but coerces his employees into donating to republican political campaigns and threatens to cut their bonuses or demote them if they don't the new republic also notes that murray energy has contributed one hundred twenty thousand dollars to romney's campaign already this year and contributor to a total of one point four million dollars to other republicans including scott brown rand paul and james inhofe bad enough that murray's at the helm of a company that is actively destroying our environment but threatening his employees if they don't make favorable political can't contributions that is very very shortly. after the break what could america possibly learn from a tiny landlocked underdeveloped nation of only seven hundred thousand people well the fact is we could learn a lot all explain what and why it's

a night's deal to take. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom hartman welcome to the big picture.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that many americans call a dollar. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot of money from you sir are a fool you know what that is my terrorist cells in your neighborhood all want to give us a feature isn't he a liberal and a christian apologist i can see your beliefs about it but it's going to school we're going to distract us from what you and i should care about because there are profit driven industry that sells a sensationalistic garbage he calls it breaking news i'm abbie martin and we're going to break that.

sometimes you know in know and sometimes you know it don't know and sometimes the fires i fear says everything you know is wrong. and you know you think you're wrong if you think you're right. to make. sure. you are always right. one hundred years ago there was little doubt in america that bend over the heads of the households in the breadwinners of the families fifty years ago not that much had changed america still largely or the husband is the leader of the family while the wife was responsible for domestic issues like cooking and cleaning the fast forward to today and despite what republicans will try to tell you these once set in stone gender roles are suddenly out of here so if you think that men are so we're in pants at home and the american and in the american economy everything you know is wrong joining me now is anna rosen senior editor of the atlantic co-founder of slate's double x. and author of the new book the end of men and the rise of women and

a walk of thank you thanks for joining us what's the main point you're trying to make in your book i mean what i'm trying to make is that women are having an easier time adapting to this economy for one reason or another it's largely because they're getting more college degrees getting the skills and credentials they need in our economy has changed and so they've changed to keep along with it and my big surprise i guess is how much this is affecting the american family as you said gender roles what men do what women do i mean all over the country so in progressive places and not progress you know less progressive places in which you know people want this to happen basically. is this is this the logical extension of the right to vote in one nine hundred twenty the one thousand nine hundred then i don't have a mix up whether it was the amendment one to the moment or in any case the right to vote in the women's movement and now these changes or is are there other factors in the economy is the huge factor if you think this is this is women reacting to the economy as opposed to partly i mean it's like you've got these open opportunities i mean women are probably always been better at school but what did it matter in one

thousand town if. you're a woman who was better at school they just weren't that many opportunities for you and so now all these years later is the manufacturing economy is waning and we've got the service and information economy suddenly it really matters that you're better at getting college degrees you know so that it's almost like patriarchal privilege and if i think about how teachers behaved when i was a kid they sort of assumed that the good guys were going to you know as you said be the head of the household take over teachers don't really assume that anymore mean they don't assume that in school and they don't really fit in that it works so much and so and they don't assume that in families i mean one of my chapters i report on a former manufacturing town where most of the adults there have lost their jobs and it's the southern town it's very religious town it used to be the man is the head of the household but as the men are not bringing home the paychecks you just see that these gender roles are suddenly scrambled not because people were marching in the streets or because the feminist movement nobody there would describe themselves as a family it's really that's kind of a dirty word in that town but because by necessity the women have picked up the slack now there's been

a backlash to this i mean there are men writing books about you know and boys are failing and more women are graduating from college and the boys are dropping out of high school or crazy and all these kind of things is that the next step would be a world where does this go if. i think it can go in two directions and one is less good and one is good i mean the war on women the republicans you mentioned that i mean that's you can't but think of of the of a debate over contraception in an age when when families are utterly dependent on the income of women and even the ambition of women the idea that we would open that up can't but be a backlash it's a backlash it just doesn't make sense and any other context what's the good place that this can go you you loosen up on gender roles a little bit you make it ok so that you know when my son grows up and his wife makes more money than he does or his girlfriend nobody thinks about it nobody writes about it nobody interviews him about it it's just no big deal i think that's the more positive direction that this is going those countries where women have more economic power more political power you have lower birth rates you have more

egalitarian. once you have more egalitarian economic systems the iroquois confederacy jefferson wrote in his diaries. two hundred fifty years ago that the earth or confederacy of the five nations four of them only allowed women to vote. because of the stipulation about the seventh generation the consideration that women were more attuned to that should we consider something with a good idea i mean it's basically becoming i'm half serious actually ok i mean sure i mean lot of european countries are sort of bay do that i mean it's just not something we do in america like well they have been committed to our way jacqueline we have forty percent of the parliament has to be female exactly iceland it's a matriarchal. system yeah and like rwanda you look at a lot of war torn countries they've sort of depended on women to kind of stitch them back together i mean it's it happens in funny ways all over the world and it's becoming the gold standard for international work so you think oh we're going to reach this country through the women it's

a way in which people think that doesn't mean that women are you know flowering and not oppressed in many countries and we know that's not true but it does mean that people are starting to think that you work through the women and you might have some success educate the girls yeah exactly the women end up with power and now you've got an egalitarian society which is more likely to be small d. democratic yeah whether we succeed or not i don't we didn't used to think that way i mean in the same way that we now think you know losing women at the top who would ever afford it now it's like a talent retention issue now we think of that as like why are we losing these women at the top what's happening you know we actually think that they're a valuable thing that we need to hold on to and yet they're still only sixteen percent of our legislature and business so it's we have a long way to go we thank you so much for making that i mean it's a pleasure thanks. now everything you know about gender roles in the twenty first century is right.

well think about what's going on in the united states right now everywhere you look the profit motive is replacing the public good what used to be our commons our education system our roads and bridges or social safety net our prisons our water and power systems you name it they're all being devoured by billionaires and they're for profit corporations and they only have one motive to make higher and higher quarterly profits so with the privatization of water facilities in detroit it's no longer a question of how water can how much how can we supply water to the most residents in the best way possible it's now a question of how can that basic human need for water be used to turn a profit for the privatization of prisons in places like ohio and arizona it's no longer a question of how can we administer our criminal justice system for the good of society but rather how can we lock up more and more americans to make more money and with the privatization of education which can be seen in the push for charter schools and billionaire funded movies promoting that it's no longer

a question about how can we educate our kids to be leaders in the new economy but rather how can we shuffle kids in and out of classes in the most profitable way possible republican party has been pushing privatization of social security since the thirty's they've been pushing privatization of medicare since the sixty's our food supply is now increasingly dominated by one private corporation monsanto that is peddling genetically modified foods that scientific tests of shown might be effective in some cases are unhealthy in lab animals but are extremely profitable that there's a privatisation of parking meters in chicago and toll booths and roadways all over the nation all around us wall street transnational corporations and billionaires are buying up our comments and more and more parts of our local neighborhoods are increasingly being run on this profit motive instead of the public good motive as they used to be. the endgame of all this is startlingly clear

a corporate state that gives no protections to the poor or the working class a corporate state that cares little for public safety and cares a lot about profitable incarceration rates a corporate state that treats students as profit cogs in the machine a corporate state that turns a blind eye to profitable genetically modified terrors in our food supply a corporate state that exhausts our long term resources for short term profits this is where we're headed and we're so far down this road already that today's generation of americans can't even remember a time when it was any different which is why we all need to pay attention to the little nation in south asia. for salvation that nation is butan for bhutan because most countries look at economic indicators like g.d.p. and total wealth ten does things differently they've replaced gross domestic product with gross national happiness therefore determining success not by looking

at how profitable their economy is but instead about how happy their people are instead of unemployment numbers and quarterly profit targets ten relies on indicators like psychological wellbeing health education time use diversity ecology and good governance and this new method appears to be working but chan is a landlocked country between india and china one of the least developed nations on the planet but it just so happens to be one of the happiest despite an average income of just one hundred ten dollars a month business week business week not the nation you know lefty weekly business week rated bhutan is the happiest nation in asia and the eighth happiest nation on the planet. and since a good ten happiness is more important than profit ten is not beholden to big transnational corporations that want to harvest that nation for profits to

paraphrase mitt romney that's why would ten is poised to be the first nation in the world to make sure one hundred percent of its domestic farming is organic over the next ten years we will completely phase out the use of chemicals in farming in the united states seventy percent of the food on grocery store shelves is made with genetically modified organisms ten we'll have zero in the entire country can you imagine a nation without profits but also without cancer and destruction of the soil robert kennedy imagine that he said this in one nine hundred sixty eight about our nation's misguided reliance on economic indicators like g.d.p. . our gross national product now is over eight hundred billion dollars a year but that gross national product if we judge the united states of america by that that gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage that count special ops cargo or

and the jails of the people who break the accounts of the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl it counts napalm. and accounts nuclear warhead and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. towns with women's rights and sex night and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. that the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children the quality of their education or the joy of their play. it does not include the beauty of optometry of the strength of our marriages the intelligence of our public debate for the integrity of our public officials it measures neither i nor our coverage neither our wisdom nor our learning neither our compassion no i've devoted to our

country it measures everything and shaw all except that which makes life worthwhile and it can tell us everything about him out of the except why we are proud that we are americans. some will say that it's a lot easier to say something like gross national happiness in a place like bhutan that only has a population of about seven hundred thousand people the size of portland oregon and its suburbs but just because battan is small it doesn't mean we should ignore their ideas some people would say it's revolutionary to think that a government should serve all the people and not just those with the money to hire a lobbyist and say it's naive to have radical things as its goal for governments existence silly and profitable things like life or liberty or the pursuit of happiness but i think it's a good idea and it's something that would make our founders proud and that's the

way it is tonight monday october eighth two thousand and twelve don't forget democracy begins with you get out there and get active tag your it see it. closer is that so much a given to each musician on the market when is the really the end of the strategy of the u.s. led mission in afghanistan is in a shambles green on blue attacks against coalition. by horse. by trucked or. by car for the road ends. as a carpenter. as a stove setter. does

a farmer. as an assistant. as a friend. as a relative delivering post and delivering goods. it's only.